The Impact of the Obama Presidency on Civil Rights Enforcement in the United States
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Indiana Law Journal Volume 87 Issue 1 Article 20 Winter 2012 The Impact of the Obama Presidency on Civil Rights Enforcement in the United States Joel Friedman Tulane University Law School, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/ilj Part of the Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons, and the President/Executive Department Commons Recommended Citation Friedman, Joel (2012) "The Impact of the Obama Presidency on Civil Rights Enforcement in the United States," Indiana Law Journal: Vol. 87 : Iss. 1 , Article 20. Available at: https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/ilj/vol87/iss1/20 This Symposium is brought to you for free and open access by the Law School Journals at Digital Repository @ Maurer Law. It has been accepted for inclusion in Indiana Law Journal by an authorized editor of Digital Repository @ Maurer Law. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Impact of the Obama Presidency on Civil Rights Enforcement in the United States ∗ JOEL WM. FRIEDMAN On Friday, August 4, 1961, police officers in Shreveport, Louisiana, arrested four African American freedom riders after the two men and two women refused to accede to the officers’ orders to exit the whites-only waiting room at the Continental Trailways bus terminal.1 Four thousand miles away, in the delivery room at Kapi’olani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital in Honolulu, Hawaii, Stanley Ann Dunham, a Kansas-born American anthropologist whose family had moved to the island state twenty years earlier, gave birth to the only child that she would have with her first husband, Barack Obama Sr., an ethnic Luo who had come to Hawaii from the Nyanza Province in southwest Kenya to pursue his education at the University of Hawaii.2 Just over forty-seven years later, on November 4, 2008, their son, Barak Obama II, a mixed-race man who identifies as black, was elected the 44th president of the United States.3 The election of the nation’s first African American president was hailed as an event of historic importance. Many heralded Obama’s victory as signaling the dismantling of “the last racial barrier in American politics.”4 Analogies were quickly and frequently drawn to the historic moment when Jackie Robinson became the first African American player in Major League Baseball.5 This superficially obvious comparison, however, diminished the causal significance of Obama’s election. When Jackie Robinson left the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro Leagues on October 23, 1945, to sign a contract with the Brooklyn Dodgers, and then made his debut on a major league diamond at Ebbets Field on April 15, 1947,6 he breached the unofficial, but rigidly enforced exclusionary “color line” in ∗ Jack M. Gordon Professor of Law, Tulane Law School. This Article is based on a presentation offered at the “Labor and Employment Law Under the Obama Administration: A Time for Hope and Change?” conference held at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law on November 12, 2010. 1. Four Riders Seized: Group Arrested in Shreveport—Madison Sit-In Still On, N.Y. TIMES, Aug. 5, 1961, at 14. 2. See Camille A. Nelson, Racial Paradox and Eclipse: Obama as a Balm for What Ails Us, 86 DENV. U. L. REV. 743, 744 (2009); David L. Ulin, Portrait Incomplete: At End of Story, We Still Don't Feel Close to Obama's Mother, CHI. TRIB., May 21, 2011, at C12; Army Medical Researchers in Kenya Mark World Malaria Day 2010, U.S. FED. NEWS, Apr. 28, 2010, available at LexisNexis; Laurie Goering, Violence Threatens Fragile Kenya; Frustration Builds at Corrupt Government, CHI. TRIB., Nov. 30, 2008, at C12. 3. See Nelson, supra note 2. 4. Adam Nagourney, Obama: Racial Barrier Falls in Decisive Victory, N.Y. TIMES, Nov. 5, 2008, at A1. 5. See, e.g., Ron Grossman, Obama in Awkward Spot in Dialogue on Prejudice, CHI. TRIB., Oct. 5, 2009, at C19; Bill Plaschke, He Was Saluting the Man, Not Taking on The Man, L.A. TIMES, Nov. 8, 2008, at D1; George Vecsey, Coast to Coast: Robinson to Obama: The Timeline Stretches 62 Years, N.Y. TIMES, Apr. 16, 2009, at B13. 6. Dave Anderson, A Number to Remember, N.Y. TIMES, Apr. 16, 2007, at D2; Kevin Sack, After Decades, A Time to Reap, N.Y. Times, Nov. 5, 2008, at A1. 350 INDIANA LAW JOURNAL [Vol. 87:349 professional baseball. But this momentous event was the product of a courageous and visionary decision by one man—Branch Ricky, the part-owner, president, and general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers.7 Obama’s election triumph, on the other hand, was the result of millions of individual determinations to vote for an African American candidate for the nation’s highest office. Beyond the unique historical aspect of Obama’s election triumph, the results of the 2008 presidential election were interpreted by many as marking the onset of a new era of American “postracialism.”8 For example, much was made of the fact that in Virginia, home of the Confederacy’s capital city, Obama amassed more votes than his Caucasian opponent.9 Many analysts concluded that the voters’ comparative assessments of each candidate’s ability to deal with the nation’s economic woes, and not his racial classification, were a crucial determinant in their decisions in the voting booth.10 They pointed to the fact that Obama’s 8.5 million vote margin of victory was, in part, the result of his receipt of 40% of the votes cast by white men, a higher share than had been garnered by any of the five previous (white) Democratic presidential nominees.11 But the voting statistics also support alternative explanations for Obama’s victory. The outgoing president, George W. Bush, was enormously unpopular, and most Americans were demanding a change from the Republican status quo.12 Additionally, the 2008 election was marked by a more than 20% surge in voting by minority group individuals, resulting in about 5.8 million more minorities voting in that election than in the preceding 2004 presidential election.13 The nationwide black vote accounted for 13% of all ballots cast in 2008, compared to 11% in 2004.14 And although candidate Obama received more votes from white voters than the previous Democratic presidential nominee, John Kerry, captured in 2004, the fact remains that a majority—55%—of all white voters cast their ballot for 15 Obama’s Republican opponent, John McCain. 7. Elsa Dixler, Paperback Row, N.Y. TIMES, May 23, 2010, at BR24; Robert H. Frank, When It Really Counts, Qualifications Trump Race, N.Y. TIMES, Nov. 16, 2008, at BU8; Richard Sandomir, Main Gate to Citi Field a Tribute to Robinson, N.Y. TIMES, Apr. 16, 2008, at D5; Editorial, True to the Dodgers; The Storied Franchise of Rickey and O’Malley Must Be Owned by Someone Other Than McCourt, L.A. TIMES, July 2, 2011, at A24. 8. See, e.g., Craig Gordon, Analysis: How Obama Won It; 5 Reasons He’ll Be in the White House, NEWSDAY, Nov. 5, 2008, at W04; John B. Judis, Editorial, It’s a Wrap—The 2008 Campaign; Did Race Really Matter?, L.A. TIMES, Nov. 9, 2008, at A34; Sack, supra note 6, at A1; Peter Wallsten, Election 2008: The Presidential Vote/News Analysis: Red and Blue, Black and White, L.A. TIMES, Nov. 5, 2008, at 11. 9. See, e.g., Wallsten, supra note 8, at 11. 10. See, e.g., Gordon, supra note 8, at W04; Hanes Walton, Jr., Josephine A.V. Allen, Sherman C. Puckett & Donald R. Deskins, Jr., Barack Obama 2008: The Making of the President, BLACK COLLEGIAN, Second Semester 2009, at 7. 11. Wallsten, supra note 8, at 11. 12. Nagourney, supra note 4, at A1. 13. Greg Gordon, Obama Rode Minority Votes, CENTRE DAILY TIMES (State College, Pa.), Nov. 19, 2008, at A1. 14. Id. 15. Gerald J. Beyer, Why Race Still Matters: Catholics and the Rise of Barack Obama, AMERICA, May 18, 2009, at 10, 11. 2012] CIVIL RIGHTS ENFORCEMENT 351 Moreover, the reality of post-inauguration events suggests that these hopeful prophecies may have been more hope than prophecy.16 Within months of his assuming the presidency, Obama was subjected to the basest of racial stereotypes and epithets. On September 12, 2009, several participants at a taxpayers’ protest march on the National Mall in Washington paraded with placards displaying the president as an African witch doctor.17 Another sign at that rally depicted a lion with the words: “The zoo has an African [photo of a lion] and the White House has a lyin’ African.”18 These events were followed by the decision by Rep. Joe Wilson (a South Carolina congressman who had supported the continued flying of the confederate flag above South Carolina’s state capitol and had denounced as a “smear” the true claim of an African American woman that she was the daughter of Strom Thurmond) to shout out “You lie!” during President Obama’s speech to a joint session of Congress.19 Former President Jimmy Carter later commented to a television reporter that “an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he’s African American.”20 Subsequently, “an aide to a Republican state senator in Tennessee sen[t] out a mass e-mail of a cartoon showing dignified portraits of the first 43 presidents, and then representing the 44th—President Obama—as a spook, a cartoonish pair of white eyes against a black background.”21 A mayor in California distributed an e-mail depicting the White House lawn as a watermelon patch (he subsequently resigned over the incident).22 And after a gorilla had escaped from a Columbia, South Carolina zoo, a prominent Republican Party activist from that state who had served as chair of the state elections commission posted on his Facebook page that the gorilla was “just one of Michelle [Obama]’s ancestors” (he subsequently apologized).23 At best, then, the record is mixed on the question of whether the election of an African American president of the United States marks, or at least presages, an era of postracialism in American society.